Abigail House for Nursing & Rehabilitation

Although we were not high on this nursing home overall, we awarded it a B for our inspections category. This score is much more impressive than the nursing home's overall grade. Our inspection ratings are based on several items found on the a nursing home's recent inspection reports. Deficiencies are an important item to look for on these reports. You should especially avoid nursing homes with severe deficiencies associated with endangerment of patients. This place was hit with 3 deficiencies on its inspection report, but none were considered to be severe deficiencies. This indicates that the government inspectors did not consider any of these deficiencies to pose an imminent threat to resident health or safety. A few minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

One of this facility's better category scores came in the area of short-term care. This wound up being its second best category. In that area, we awarded this facility a B-. Our short-term care scores are probably more important for those requiring a nursing home for rehabilitation. Rehabilitation usually utilizes additional skilled nursing. Skilled nursing means not just nursing services, but also physical and speech therapy, as well as other forms of therapy. Unfortunately, we found that this nursing home provided fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. Lastly, we considered the number of patients who were able to return to the community from this nursing home. We found that 5.5 percent of this facility's residents returned home. At most nursing homes, closer to half of their residents are able to return home so this figure is below average.

Sadly, this facility's next best score was long-term care. As it turns out, with a D in this category, it still fared somewhat badly. In a long-term care setting, the facility's primary goal is to keep patients as healthy and safe as possible. This is different than skilled nursing or short-term care where the goal is to rehabilitate residents. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we next considered the nursing home's vaccination data. We were optimistic to find that this facility vaccinated 99.34747 percent of its patients for pneumonia. To our surprise, this place was able to limit hospitalizations. With only 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this nursing home has fewer hospitalizations than most nursing homes. Unfortunately, some of its other scores in the category weren't as favorable as these.

The final category we assessed was nursing, is this facility's worst category. We gave this facility a D in this category. There are several criteria included in this grade. Most of these subcategories relate to nurse staffing. This particular facility offered just 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident each day. This number is significantly below average. This facility also had abysmal scores in some of the quality-based measures to go along with its weak nursing hour totals. We looked at the percentage of patients suffering pressure ulcers and we were quite disappointed. This place was at roughly 150 percent of the national average in this measure. This is a bad sign in light of the fact that many pressure ulcers are preventable with better nursing care. This statistic helped pull down this facility's nursing rating quite a bit.